Nellie Ohr got a technician class amateur radio license. If you were going to use HF to send secret messages, why bother to get a call sign? HF emissions are difficult to direction-find (a thousand times more so if they're brief), so it's not for fear of the FCC Candy Van showing up. A technician class ticket gets you next to no HF privileges anyway.

In regards to Ohr, Q said "Avoid NSA data collection. It failed." I found this somewhat eyebrow-raising, as Ohr would have to be the dumbest 'woman' in the world to think 'she' needed a tech ticket to become a shady HF user.

So either 1) Ohr is terminally retarded, 2) 'her' ham ticket actually doesn't have much to do with anything, or 3) Ohr got a tech ticket to make 'her' actual shady communications seem plausibly deniable: as in "She's just a ham, she's not doing anything weird!"

The NSA is probably dumping raw SDR IQ data into their massive data centers, just like other means of communication. So, encrypted messages sent on the radio wouldn't be any less or more inscrutable to the NSA than the same message sent through the Internet. Ohr probably got a tech ticket to discredit "conspiracy theories." Maybe it worked: these old codgers think it's awful silly: https://www . eham . net/articles/40551

73